Thursday, November 2, 2017

A-Girl v1

When I wrote the blog post about the original, incomplete release of A-Girl in September, 2016, I said that if we ever found a complete raw, we'd release a new version. We did, and we have.

A-Girl is one of six shoujo OVAs based on properties from Margaret Magazine and animated by Madhouse. The others are POPS, Singles, Kiss wa Me ni Shite, Oeda wa Nemurenai, and Oshare Kozou wa Hanamaru. None of them was very successful apparently, because none were ever released on Laserdisc, let alone DVD. Orphan's previous version of A-Girl used a web 384p encode derived from a YouTube rip. It stopped after 25 minutes. Because the story seemed wrapped up, I assumed that only the end credits were missing. I was wrong.

The last segment of A-Girl, which lasts six minutes and is based on the song The Magic of Your Sight, brings the story of Mariko (the A-Girl of the title) and Natsume (the playboy brought low by her charms) to a real conclusion. It includes the end credits too, but it also includes actual dialog, a whopping six lines of it. (It also includes an additional 250 lines of typesetting just for a "Whipped Cream" label, but who's counting?) With the last segment, the OVA is now 31 minutes long and makes more sense.

Iri obtained the new raw by buying a used VHS tape in Japan. Our media guy transcribed it, and M74 encoded it. It's still not perfect - tape stretch causes noticeable audio distortion in three places - but at least it's complete. Iri translated and timed the additional signs and dialog, I did the additional editing and typesetting, and Nemesis and Eternal_Blizzard did QC. This tape, imperfect though it was, was quite expensive, so I don't think Orphan will invest further in A-Girl media. Perhaps it will show up on DVD someday, in some sort of Madhouse retrospective.

As usual, you can get the complete version of A-Girl from the usual torrent sites or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.


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